EVENING DISCOURSES. 759 
evidence relating to fossil forms of man, we must confess that the antiquity of 
the modern form of man is still an open problem. I, for one, am convinced that 
we have followed him almost unchanged to at least the middle of the Pleistocene, 
when we find him accompanied by another form of man almost as distinct from 
him as the gorilla is from the chimpanzee. Still further back, at the beginning 
of the Pleistocene, we find at least two forms of men—the pre-Neanderthaloid 
of Heidelberg and the small-brained man of Java—but the representatives of 
modern man at this early period we do not know. It does seem to me, taking 
all the scraps of evidence at our disposal, the slow rate of human evolution and 
the great blanks in the geological record into account, that a man as high as the 
Australoid of to-day was then in existence, but I cannot bring myself to believe 
that human individuals as highly evolved as those discovered by Professor Ragaz- 
zoni were in existence at an early part of the Pliocene period. 
The problem of man’s antiquity is not yet solved. ‘he picture I wish to 
leave in your minds is that in the distant past there was not one kind but a 
number of very different kinds of men in existence, all of which have become 
extinct except that branch which has given origin to modern man. On the 
imperfect knowledge at present at our disposal it seems highly probable that 
man as we know him now took on his human characters near the beginning of 
the Pliocene period. How long ago that is must be measured, as Professor 
Boyd Dawkins insists, by the changes which the earth and living things have 
undergone, and yet it is only human to try to find a means of measuring that 
period in a term of years, and the estimates at hand give an antiquity of at 
least a million and a half of years. 
